1843 in the United Kingdom

1843 in the United Kingdom:

Other years

1841 | 1842 | 1843 | 1844 | 1845

Sport

1843 English cricket season

Events from the year 1843 in the United Kingdom.

Incumbents

• Monarch — Victoria
• Prime Minister — Robert Peel (Conservative)

Events

• January — The Quaker magazine The Friend begins publication.
• 6 January — Antarctic explorer James Clark Ross discovers Snow Hill Island.
• 20 January — Daniel M'Naghten shoots and kills the Prime Minister's private secretary, Edward Drummond, in Whitehall.
• 4 March — M'Naghten is found not guilty of murder "by reason of insanity", giving rise to the M'Naghten Rules on criminal responsibility, and subsequently committed to Bethlem Hospital.
• 24 March — Battle of Hyderabad: The Bombay Army led by Major General Sir Charles Napier defeats the Talpur Emirs, securing Sindh province for the British Raj.
• 25 March — Marc Isambard Brunel's Thames Tunnel, the first tunnel under the River Thames, is opened.
• 27 March — Decision in Foss v Harbottle, a leading precedent in English corporate law, declares that in any action in which a wrong is alleged to have been done to a company, the proper claimant is the company itself and not individual shareholders.
• 4 April — William Wordsworth accepts the office of Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom following the death of Robert Southey on 21 March.
• 4 May — Natal proclaimed British colony.
• 18 May — The Disruption of the Church of Scotland takes place in Edinburgh.
• 19 July — Isambard Kingdom Brunel's SS Great Britain is launched from Bristol.
• September — Ada Lovelace translates and expands Menabrea’s notes on Charles Babbage's analytical engine, including an algorithm for calculating a sequence of Bernoulli numbers, regarded as the world's first computer program.
• 2 September — The Economist newspaper first published (preliminary issue dated August).
• 1 October — News of the World newspaper first published. It will survive until 2011.
• 3 November–4 November — The statue of Nelson placed atop Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square, London.
• 13 December — Basutoland becomes a British protectorate.
• December — The world's first Christmas cards, commissioned by Sir Henry Cole in London from the artist John Callcott Horsley, are sent.

Undated

• Theatres Act ends the virtual monopoly on theatrical performances held by the patent theatres, encouraging the development of popular entertainment.
• Protestant Martyrs' Memorial erected in Oxford.

Publications

• Charles Dickens's novel Martin Chuzzlewit (begins serialisation January) and novella A Christmas Carol (17 December).
• John Stuart Mill’s book A System of Logic.
• John Ruskin's book Modern Painters, vol. 1.
• Robert Smith Surtees' comic novel Handley Cross.

Births

• 25 April — Princess Alice, member of the royal family (died 1878)
• 30 June — Ernest Satow, diplomat and scholar (died 1929)

Deaths

• 9 January — William Hedley, inventor and locomotive engineer (born 1779)
• 21 March — Robert Southey, poet (born 1774)
• 25 March — Robert Murray M'Cheyne, clergyman (born 1813)
• 21 April — Prince Augustus Frederick, Duke of Sussex (born 1773)
• 1 June — William Abbot, actor (born 1798)
• 25 July — Charles Macintosh, chemist (born 1766)
• 18 December — Thomas Graham, Lord Lynedoch, Governor-General of India (born 1748)